"Love Is Had Only by Loving"       Thursday, April 29, is the feast day of St. Catherine of Sienna (1347-1380), an incredibly remarkable woman. She was the 23rd of 24 children, and the year after her birth the plague (“Black Death”) wiped out half the population of Sienna, Italy. At age six she had a vision of Christ that led her to dedicate her life to God, and clearly God guided her spiritual growth from then on, teaching her the first commandment to love God with all her heart, then teaching her the second commandment of love of neighbor.       St. Catherine left behind numerous writings, and her many letters can be quite direct and full of wisdom. In one such letter she raises the question of how to acquire love. Her answer: “Love is had only by loving. If you want love, you must begin by loving – I mean you must want to love.” Simple enough. Easy? No. She says, “Once you want it, you must open the eye of your understanding to see where and ho...

The Catholic Mind       “What Makes the Catholic Mind Unique?” is the title of an article by Fr. David Meconi, SJ, in the December 2020 issue of New Oxford Review magazine, available online.       To summarize his presentation, we might start with creation: space, time, matter. “God’s world,” Fr. Meconi says, “by its very nature, is a sacramental that lifts human minds to their Creator through the divine embeddedness of matter. For the truly Catholic mind, this world is awash with grace.”       “Embeddedness” here is something like St. Paul’s expression that God’s “eternal power and deity has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made” ( Ro 1:20 ). And yet it goes further. It means God’s incarnation. Not absorption – we are not God, the universe is not God.       Incarnation means the Second Person of the Divine Trinity assumed human flesh in Jesus Christ, which flesh has the ...

The Gospel of the Forty Days:  The Church as the Restored Kingdom       Last week we developed the theme of the Messianic expectation of the restoration of the Kingdom of David, and asserted that in Jesus’s teaching about the “kingdom of God” during the forty days between His resurrection and ascension (Ac 1:3), He would have taught that this kingdom is now the Church. Let’s explore that a bit more.       David’s kingdom was based on covenant with God (2 Sam 7:1-29), which included God’s promise to establish an eternal kingdom with a descendant of David, and “I will be His Father, and He shall be My Son.” Luke’s Gospel makes it clear that Jesus, in the flesh, is a descendant of David (Lk 2:4-7, 3:31); and in previous articles we have discussed some of the Bible’s evidence that Jesus is, at the same time, in His Divinity, the Son of God.       Now at the Last Supper, Jesus says to the Twelve, “As My Father appoin...